


Heaven go easy on me

by foughtyen



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Stress Relief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23978203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foughtyen/pseuds/foughtyen
Summary: For all the hurt and grating like misaligned teeth between them, Akimaru knows Haruna is solid ground. Haruna will not hurt him. Not on purpose.
Relationships: Akimaru Kyouhei/Haruna Motoki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Heaven go easy on me

**Author's Note:**

> I miss these two, that is all.

Gray is the color of hell and muggy Saitama afternoons. Beneath the dim-bright haze, Akimaru crouches in beet-red dust. It clouds around him, thrown up by the feet of each new batter.

With Haruna’s pitch count this high, two wild pitches in a row could be nothing but lottery-level bad luck. As the eleventh inning threatens to become a twelfth, three wild pitches is a nightmare, pure and simple. 

Akimaru gets it now, the soil’s thirst for water in summer. Even though the air is heavy with vapor, Akimaru’s mouth dries just watching; his chest looks to cave as held-out hopes carve it hollow.

Nothing good ever came of wishing for rain, but Akimaru considers it. Not enough to delay the game, just some sprinkles to lift Haruna’s senses to his skin. Even praying would feel more like doing something than merely squatting, small and helpless, beneath a broad sky’s dome.

Akimaru’s feet jostle to the mound. Haruna’s worse up close. Akimaru’s supposed to ground him, be a lightning rod to discharge the static. It’s never been like this.

Haruna starts to slip in the seventh, eighth if they're lucky, but even then—if he’s not always calm, composed, collected, he’s certainly been contained. Now his eyes and his joints crackle panicked, thunder ready to spill. At once tense and deflated, his breathing lifts his shoulders in an endless procession of doubt, breath after breath shrugging _I don't know, I don't know_.

Akimaru doesn’t say it, so Haruna does. “This is bad,” gurgles from just above his stomach. An edge of something like desperation chasms wide and deep through his voice. Not like it’s a secret that the whole stadium isn’t also screaming at their forebrains. Yet hearing Haruna acknowledge it imparts a gravity that raises hairs on Akimaru’s neck.

Sweat runs in their eyes, the weather's cruel trick. An achy chest isn't enough. Under the apex of August, both their corneas and spirits must sting.

A pressed-lip quarter-half-assery of a smile swells to Akimaru’s face before he can bite it back. The meaning is clear, a resigned yup. The humor of the cornered has a different shape.

With nothing left to do, in performance of contrition, Akimaru lifts his eyes to Haruna’s. He holds the pitcher’s shoulders, patting the left one twice. He lingers for a moment, trying in vain to say something encouraging. When nothing comes, he hopes with his heart’s loudest voice his presence alone imbues some sort of calm as he returns to sit behind home.

The inning finds the mercy to end with the next batter, a pop fly and two more outs like a pinball trick. The game has the cruelty to go on, tied.

Haruna’s shallow stare clears the way before them in the heavy shade of the dugout. After getting his own water and gulping gracelessly to swallow the feeling of sand in his throat, he takes Akimaru’s arm and rushes to hallway. A strategy simple in name but terrible in execution: pull each other aside to pull each other together.

“How are you doing?” Akimaru wipes a bead of sweat from his glasses and can’t see Haruna frown.

Haruna’s frayed nerves support the weight of one word. “Come.” 

He leads and Akimaru follows into a room carved among the stadium’s concrete ribs. The walls are littered with its viscera: wires, panels, ducts. He tries a door. Locked. He tries another that gives.

They’ve walked into a separate season. Wisps of chill accost them. Sweat flees their skin. The residual heat of blood seeping to the skin is the only trace of August left in the air.

Akimaru sinks into a chair and rushes to collect himself. He pulls off the catcher’s mask and hugs it in his lap.

“This is bad,” Haruna repeats, unbuttoning his jersey and peeling off his undershirt. He backs against an exposed section of duct, stretching and shivering contentedly along the strip of cold metal.

Enough sweat stays that the lights overhead lift a slight sheen on his stomach. It warps convex, convexer with his breathing. 

Once cooled he approaches Akimaru. “I think this could work so—I need you—to make out with me.”

“What?” There's something colossally unnerving about how Haruna leans eagerly over him, his body already curling greedily around the prospect of it.

Haruna lowers his head and shakes it like he expects to dislodge something, raking his thick hair with clawed hands. “It’s supposed to feel good, okay? I need to forget, even for just a moment. Help me.”

“Are you dizzy? Light-headed? Sure you're not _severely_ dehydrated?” Akimaru names his own symptoms.

“Didn’t you see me chugging? I’m fine.” Haruna snaps, more impatient than angry.

“Point taken.” Akimaru hears a cartoon sound effect in his head as he gulps, Wile E. Coyote seeing his demise at the bottom of a canyon after running off a cliff. He sips in a lungful of sterile air and releases it slowly.

Unlike the dugout, there’s no dust to stir up. The road ahead is agonizingly clear.

“It doesn’t make sense, but it’ll work.” Haruna clenches a determined fist.

Akimaru pretends to not notice how Haruna’s eyes are circling his lips, how his body takes aim at him.

Akimaru knows when to fight Haruna and when to let him win. He can anticipate how Haruna will hold this over him like so many other failings. 

All he feels when letting himself wonder freely about the texture of Haruna’s lips and the taste of his skin is a collision of recall and inevitability. He knows what Haruna’s gum-fresh breath will taste like. He's seen and held every contour on Haruna’s back. It will be the same information, simply resurveyed from another angle. 

Akimaru rationalizes fast and hard, justifying this as a kind of physical cubism, a singular chance to experience more of the same as something new and something else. He never imagined it would come like this, rushed and washed in sterile light, is all. 

How had he imagined it otherwise? It all jams behind a single word, “okay.” 

He sets the catcher’s mask beside his ankles and pats his thighs in invitation.

When surprise shines across Haruna’s face, Akimaru loses a heartbeat. Many more follow as Haruna swings his leg to straddle Akimaru and his chair. A halo flashes behind his head, tacky but angelic. Akimaru silently thanks the heavens as it distracts a glance from Haruna’s stomach, flexed mid-step.

Haruna sets his weight down in Akimaru’s lap. The chair groans. Akimaru braces for impact, but Haruna stops like a mime pressed to glass.

“It _is_ supposed to feel good, okay?” Haruna says less than confidently.

“if it feels so good, go for it,” Akimaru shoots back. “This was your idea.”

“Hey.” Haruna gets their eyes to meet. “I’m doing this with you because I trust you the most, got it? We’ve been through thick and thin, so no hard feelings if anything goes wrong.”

Haruna talks like this is some kind of privilege. It amounts to thanking without thanking. This is just a favor. A service, a kindness, a mere inconvenience on Akimaru’s part. Simple stress relief.

“How will anything go wrong? I agreed to this already, just now on the condition that you make the first move!” Akimaru tries to rock in protest, but Haruna’s weight pins him to the chair.

“Let's do a test one. just in case.” Haruna suggests. "Just one press, no more than—five seconds. Then we pull away."

"Fine by me." Akimaru bites his lower lip to forever hold his peace.

Haruna’s touch arrives softly along Akimaru’s cheek. His fingertips rest carefully, eager but unsure despite his efforts to steady them. Akimaru feels their tremor and wonders where the nervousness is from, the gambit, the game or this. Either would be a surprise. 

Haruna’s right hand seeks a space to rest, finding Akimaru’s side. It grips the first character of the school name (武), squeezing it between impatient fingers until it becomes an asterisk, a squashed spider on a field of gray.

“Just look at my eyes, okay?" Haruna says, breath quickening.

Akimaru focuses with a steady wonder. The brown disks of Haruna’s irises cower against the whites, forced out by widened pupils. A person's pupils, he remembers, will dilate in response to attraction. 

Akimaru bookmarks that as something to forget now and overanalyze later. His only task right now is to bring his gaze to Haruna’s. They behold each other.

“Put your hand on my face too. Or my neck.” Haruna’s breath puffs against Akimaru’s lips. “That way we can blame each other, just in case.”

Akimaru raises his hand to Haruna’s neck, finding his pulse quaking just below the skin, not far from the copper-cream border of his tan line. Blame is the last thing on his mind.

“Let’s touch noses first,” Akimaru suggests. His palms burn with the heat of Haruna’s blush. There’s no doubt Haruna reads the same readiness from his cheeks. “No need to go too fast.”

They look slightly down to dispel any doubt that only skin will touch. The delicate maneuver earns one more point of contact. Haruna fidgets, trying not to laugh, so Akimaru learns another place he’s ticklish and files it away. He never would have tried there, never would have thought it a candidate.

“Uh, how long did I say the kiss would last?”

“Doesn't matter if it doesn't happen. My arm's getting tired.”

“Okay, just— _shit_ ”. Haruna’s eyes flood with alarm.

“What is it now?” A painful flash illuminates their vision as Akimaru taps his forehead to Haruna’s, hard enough to hurt but soft enough to recover quickly.

“Tongue?”

“I—” Akimaru becomes aggressively aware of the slick of his own saliva at the back of his throat, the texture of his cheeks, the slight dryness of his lips. “I think that's something you know when you get there.”

“Okay.”

“Can I move my hand? Elbow’s falling asleep.” Akimaru shakes the length of his arm emphatically. Their linked bodies sway.

“Here, let me.” Haruna brings Akimaru’s fingers through his hair, bringing the fleshy part of the thumb to buoy at his hairline. Akimaru notices how he shivers at the sensation.

“Should I move yours?”

“It’s fine.” Haruna’s ring finger dabs the short hairs that would become Akimaru’s sideburns if allowed to grow. On either side of Haruna’s nose, Akimaru can make out the corners of his lips upturned.

“All good now?”

“I’m ready when you are.”

“I’ve been ready!” Akimaru flares.

“Then in three. Two. One.” In unison, they roll their necks a fraction of a degree back. Each tilts his head leisurely to one side like ships rocking with a harbor wave, the tip of his nose touching vacated air. The bows of their lips catch each other and stay.

Warmth blossoms behind Akimaru’s breastbone. He breathes in at the moment Haruna’s shoulders rise, something swelling between them like the body of the ocean reaching out to grasp the moon. Haruna raises his right hand from rest and embraces Akimaru fully, drawing him in closer, searching for more of the feeling of flight.

Akimaru leans away, having lived the longest and shortest five seconds of his life.

Haruna touches Akimaru’s temples. “Wasn’t so bad, right?” He bows so that their foreheads touch, friendlier this time, his bangs meshing softly against Akimaru’s forehead.

Akimaru’s lips stick half-spread, but he delivers an _uh-uh_ and a turn of the neck to accompany it.

Akimaru anticipates the jolt of Haruna once again rocking his body forward. He closes his eyes and waits for a tremor. In a lightning strike of motion, so much shatters over him, noise against the blackened backdrop of his eyelids. Weight shifts atop his thighs. A small breath in thins the air between them as Haruna spreads his mouth again. His tongue between Akimaru’s lips, he prompts Akimaru to do the same.

Before the panic sets in, Akimaru takes a second to take stock of the situation. Basic things to know, basic things to consider. Some things aren't surprising. Haruna’s tongue feels like a tongue should. Warm and slippery. Haruna’s saliva is just wet. His own probably tastes like adrenaline, but Haruna’s mouth tastes like he could have guessed, had he ever dared to guess.

The panic sets in as their tongues slide across each other. Slick sounds like chewing, like slurping come from their mouths and Akimaru listens, trying to forget that it's Haruna on the other side of his skin.

What sort of irreparable damage is this doing to their already scarred relationship? Answers flash across Akimaru’s mental picture show.

If he could peel this memory from the film of his history and leave it to wither and gnarl like the rind of a fruit, to have recalling it capture the saccharine without the bitter aftertaste, maybe then could he wholeheartedly offer himself to Haruna. Instead, as every membrane of their mouths tries in vain to become seamless, he keeps part of himself private and feels greedy for it.

Akimaru wonders, is he breathing enough? His chest rocks steadily as air comes and goes, but he feels like he’s floating. The shock hits, not all at once, as if the sea climbed out of Tokyo bay and surged inland on white-capped fingers. It comes in pulses, like letting out breaths once submerged, lungs clenched tighter with each bubble of carbon dioxide. Haruna’s fingers lift his hair, weightless as in water.

Akimaru tries and struggles to remember: He’s just a body to forget with, né Akimaru Kyouhei, formerly Haruna’s wall, now hands and a mouth. if this is the closest he can get to being appreciated for his presence, his constancy, then damnit, he'll take it.

In its own way, the body is always forgetting. Each impression of Haruna’s lips is obliterated by nerves the moment after its creation, through the seething network of axons made by salt and electricity. And yet like a cathedral with mere daylight multiplied and recolored into holiness, beneath the white light flickering, here is Haruna, the same surfaces, curves and crests of back and shoulder re-remembered, inseparable from the sweat and desperation.

If he never gets this chance again, Akimaru would forever see Haruna’s lips glistening with his own regret, remember the sturdy curve of Haruna’s body arching over him. No way would he forget this and make himself forever wonder.

Besides, Akimaru knows too much already. He just learned the shape of Haruna’s hips, the weight of his ass, the warmth of his mouth, the pace of his kisses—with brief presses of his fingertips, centimeter by centimeter Akimaru remaps what he has known by other means. Haruna’s shoulders are hard like flint and ripe for sparks. the taut skin that rounds his clavicles is unfairly soft. His hair is greased with one game’s grime but for all Akimaru cares it could be silk.

Baseball, their little league coach was fond of saying, is the sport waiting for filled hands. Before you hit the ball with the bat, before you catch the ball, you practice, you prepare, you wait. When the moment finally comes, you know what to do with it. Your muscles will know what to do before your brain does. Your heart will overtake your head. _Just don’t trip._

Akimaru will never be able to forget that it’s Haruna, the sour reek of his sweat, the pace of his breath, the texture of each wrinkle of skin. He won’t admit it but he loves him, he loves baseball. The two are intertwined and inseparable. His hands are full and he is ready.

He opens his eyes to Haruna’s, big, piercing and brown, relieved when he breathes fully for the first time, heavy and heartily.

The chair creaks again as Haruna rises, stretching his arms above his head, saying nothing. Too long after, he concludes, “That's enough.”

Akimaru takes a last sip of Haruna’s air, a final tally of his tongue. What if this is their last time this close?

Haruna squeezes before letting go. He slips his uniform over his undershirt over his torso. “Aki, uh—that—" 

Akimaru stops listening because he can’t. The sound refuses to enter his ears. Whatever follows doesn’t matter, the hitch is what's damning.

“Don't—an- any—" Akimaru hammers the word with his tongue until it fits through his teeth. “—anytime.”

“What I'm saying is, I liked it.” Haruna says blankly.

“I know.” Akimaru still looks at his hands, thinking about what kind of stories they will tell his brain in whispers late at night. Akimaru’s world hemorrhaged secrets, but he considers what more there are, hidden between their two bodies, left unknown because of hesitation he swallowed instead of releasing. “I did too.”

“We didn't consider that, ‘s all.”

Akimaru winces, thinking he's cost them at least the game, maybe the season, maybe Haruna’s mental outlook entirely. For want of Akimaru holding his mouth, the pitcher was lost.

“But you're my catcher. You take care of me.” Haruna says in his feignedly disinterested way that convinces neither, with a voice ironed of emotion, lowered and excessively nasal. Face to face, their eyes would have parted, the façade rebuilt.

“I don’t think that’s quite how the job description reads.” Akimaru says, half-invested in his own response, still processing Haruna’s reply. Akimaru understands it not as closing, but an advance return to the steeled form that will strike out the next three batters. The _last_ three batters, Akimaru tells himself. Akimaru should get to thinking too, how’s he going to make it through the rest of the game, kept from breaking by adrenaline and muscle memory?

“Shush, I'm praising you, almost.” Haruna sounds strangely robotic when he puffs his feeling into his cheeks, wherever it will fit. “Good work!”

Akimaru wishes his chest wasn’t heavy with the weight of sadness and something with the slender shape of guilt. “I would do it again,” he says slowly.

Brightness revisits Haruna’s face like the sky after rain. "That's what I wanted to hear.” He loudens, “I’m counting on you, let’s finish it this inning!”

Opportune as always, Akimaru’s tongue opts for now to jam, too many thoughts competing for expression: relief at the assured state of Haruna’s recovery, but mostly lost in his inner ear, savoring the fading sound of Haruna’s reciprocity, however roundabout as it finally percolates through him. One step at a time.

Akimaru’s body rebounds like bedrock faced with the new absence of glaciers; he lifts himself, floating.

The sounds of blood and brine subside in his head. He un-plasters his tongue from the roof of his mouth, relocates himself in the cool grey room with crisp corners.

Haruna is gone, marched out through the door, chest puffed like a songbird.

WINNER: MUSASHINO DAIICHI 8-7


End file.
